After more than 35 years of subterranean bootleg life, Bob Dylan’s incendiary gospel shows and sessions from 1979 to 1981 are seeing the light of day as volume 13 of the Official Bootleg Series. Trouble No More comes as a regular two-CD and deluxe eight-CD/ one-DVD collection that exhaustively returns us to those three years of otherworldly fervour and rage against earthly corruption. And it starts, as it started for Dylan, with the hammer-wielding riff of “Slow Train”.“It was exciting because it was controversial,” says Little Feat guitarist Fred Tackett of those extraordinary three years. Read more ...

Fancy that: the day after the last major Menotti staging I can remember in the UK, The Medium at the Edinburgh Festival, "splendid piece of post-Puccinian grand guignol" turned up in two different reviews (moral: don't discuss the performance with your colleagues). "Dated piece of post-Puccinian absurdist melodrama" might be a bit harsh but not so wide of the mark in the case of The Consul, his late 1940s fantasy rooted in the horrors of totalitarianism and western bureaucracy. Certainly the Guildhall School students, conductor and production team gave it the best possible chance, making it Read more ...

Following the recent death of the band's co-founder Walter Becker, it seemed faintly remarkable that Steely Dan went ahead with this O2 show at all – it was the closing night event of Bluesfest 2017 – but Becker’s absence wasn’t allowed to detract from the sustained brilliance of the performance. The Dan’s surviving guru, Donald Fagen, has announced that “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band”, and surely it has never sounded better.Becker and Fagen always loved the idea of the great jazz orchestras, not least Duke Ellington’s band, and Read more ...

Terry Johnson's award-winning 1982 play Insignificance hasn't been seen in London since the playwright directed a 1995 revival at the Donmar (though Sam West staged his own production a decade later in Sheffield). But even the intrigue inherent in finding Johnson's own daughter, Alice, in the pivotal role of the unnamed actress who is clearly Marilyn Monroe can't steady director David Mercatali's reckoning with the play this time out.Four hugely distinct icons of American history are thrown together during one eventful 1950s night in Albert Einstein's New York hotel room as he finds himself Read more ...

Both Rhode Island’s Downtown Boys, and Washington D.C.’s Priests sit at the centre of today’s feminist punk scene. As stated in a recent Downtown Boys press release, they oppose “the prison-industrial complex, racism, queerphobia, capitalism, fascism, boredom, and all things people use to try to close our minds, eyes and hearts”. This, perhaps, explains why the promoters have listed the night as a “radical double bill”. Having also both released extremely well received albums this year - Cost of Living and Nothing is Natural respectively - they descend on Manchester’s Deaf Institute amid a Read more ...

"I’m a person who, knock on wood, hasn’t suffered a lot of writer’s block," speaks/sings Kozelek in the song “Topo Gigio”. And he’s not kidding. This new album is just one of six collaborations and solo efforts over the last couple of years, each brimming over with confessional, visionary, banal, funny and wise words. This deluge of work is arguably both a good and a less good thing. The less good aspect is that it places a lot of demands on his audience to stay focussed for sometimes 15 minutes at a time (the length of some of these songs) over this many hours of work, while their hero Read more ...

They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. It's Netflix’s new series about the FBI in the Seventies, when the Bureau was slowly starting to realise that catching criminals needed more than the old “just the facts, ma’am” approach. Society is changing and so is crime, with serial killers like Ted Bundy and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz baffling the sleuthing community with their seemingly motiveless killings. Into this strange new world walks Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who, despite his Joe College Read more ...

It was a topsy-turvy evening. Sometimes the things you expect to turn out best disappoint, while in this case the relatively small beer yielded a true "Little Great" of a production and the best singing in Opera North's latest double bill (subject to reshuffling during the rest of the run). Janáček's Osud (Destiny) should have packed the emotional punch of the night – a score authentically vivid in every bar tied to an experimental plot and a libretto sometimes pretentious in its observations on art and life; Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti has more trouble finding its heart. But conviction, Read more ...

Fish out of water come in various guises in Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War fable, shown at London Film Festival. The Shape of Water riffs on The Creature from the Black Lagoon with its amphibious man-god, captured in 1962 to be cattle-prodded and dissected by the film’s real monster, US agent Strickland (Michael Shannon). Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaner at Strickland’s Area 51-style facility, her ageing, failing gay neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), black fellow cleaner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Soviet double-agent Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) are also feeling the American outsider Read more ...

Some will rob you with a six-gunAnd some with a fountain pen.…I was around 12 years old when I first heard those lines, from “Pretty Boy Floyd”, written by Woody Guthrie and sung by Joan Baez on a live album recorded on her 1962 tour of America’s black campuses. I couldn’t fathom what they meant – how could you be robbed with a fountain pen?I was in the early stages of my obsession with what I would come to understand as “the New York folk revival”, an obsession that has, in ways large and small, shaped my life though the revival was by then already long over. I’m not sure when I figured out Read more ...

An American TV show about drugs and drug dealers? How frightfully novel. At least The Deuce (showing now on Sky Atlantic) is about pornography instead.Anyhow Snowfall has been created by John Singleton, of Boyz n the Hood fame, and whisks us back to Los Angeles in 1983, where a crack cocaine epidemic is about to erupt and unleash all kinds of lawless, gang-warfare hell. For the time being though, South Central LA is presented as a prelapsarian demi-paradise, a friendly, sunlit neighbourhood where the only thing folks shoot is the breeze, under brilliant blue skies. The most memorable shot in Read more ...

It’s easier to admire than fall in love with the music of St Vincent aka Annie Clark. But then again does one genuinely fall in love with a Bacon painting or a Beckett play? It’s just that we’re more used to taking pop songs to our heart, fondly looking back on them as markers of key moments on our lives. Having said that, some love struck couple might semi-ironically play Massduction’s lead single “New York” at their wedding. It’s resigned hook line, ‘You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,’ is delivered with such melancholy gratitude that it does evoke an emotional Read more ...